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After a summer in which every city service seemed to be threatened by the Ford administration’s cost-cutting axe — inciting thousands of residents to weigh in on the municipal programs they hold dear — a report to be released Monday could bring into focus exactly what cuts councillors will vote on later this year.

City manager Joe Pennachetti will make public staff recommendations following consultant KPMG’s controversial service review, which rankled citizens in July by suggesting library closures, eliminating subsidies to 2,000 daycare spaces, shutting long-term care homes, closing Riverdale farm and cancelling arts grants, as among the ways to shrink the city’s 2012 budget shortfall, projected to be up to $774 million.

“Certainly we’re nervous,” said Alexandra Mandelis, an organizer with Mothers 4 Child Care, who gathered together a handful of mothers Sunday morning for a small show of opposition to cuts to city-funded child care. “There’s definitely a sense of fear with parents — they absolutely cannot imagine what they would do if they lost their spots.”

At Eastminster United Church in Councillor Paula Fletcher’s Toronto-Danforth ward, more than 200 people attended a meeting hosted by Fletcher and neighbouring Councillor Mary Fragedakis dubbed, “Preserving Our Great City.”

Speakers came from a number of city services named in KPMG’s report, including the Toronto Arts Council and Toronto Environmental Alliance.

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Fletcher told the crowd she has received 2,000 letters from her constituents opposed to cuts to public libraries, while local author Robert Rotenberg and library union president Maureen O’Reilly, received the loudest cheers for their speeches against library closures.

“We must remain ever vigilant,” O’Reilly said as she delivered what amounted to a call-to-arms to oppose any branch closures. “Our libraries are not for sale,”

Fragedakis criticized KPMG’s bottom-line focus on the costs and benefits of municipal services. “They didn’t evaluate how these cuts will affect people’s lives,” she said.

Monday’s report will be debated by the city’s Executive Committee on Sept. 19, and then by council as part of the 2012 budget process — expected to be the toughest since amalgamation — which will not reach a final vote until January.

With Pennachetti aiming for an across-the-board budget cut of $380 million, all departments have been asked to find 10 per cent in savings, which has drawn strong rebukes from Toronto fire and police services in particular, arguing the cuts will mean the loss of hundreds of officers and firefighters.

But it remains unclear whether the report will be the first step toward a long and combative budget debate or if it will raise more questions.

On Friday, at a City Hall press gallery briefing — from which the Toronto Star was excluded — Ford’s chief policy adviser Mark Towhey reportedly said Monday’s report would be “anticlimactic.”

Councillors outside Ford’s inner circle were in the dark about what the recommendations would include.

“I feel like that guy in Hogan’s Heroes,” said Beaches-East York Councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon. “I know nothing, I see nothing, I hear nothing.”

Left-leaning Councillor Janet Davis said she had no idea what the report would recommend, but said it is only the first of many steps.

“In the end it won’t be the executive (committee), it won’t be the budget committee, it will be council — and the constituents they represent — who decides.”

The KPMG review — which Davis said was “supposed to find the gravy, but didn’t” — provided staff with a number of options for potential cuts, but little direction. “Everything is still up in the air,” she said.

Davis said she wants more information — such as the city’s projected 2011 budget surplus and the projected revenue from the land transfer tax — before she can make any decision on service cuts.

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